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A DAY OF JUDGEMENT

After a long-faced town minister abandons his post due to the local population's indifference to religion (his congregation has been whittled down to three elderly women), a sinister figure in black sweeps quietly through the village to wreak righteous revenge on several of the more wicked citizens. Sinners abound, including a corpulent, self-important banker, an addled, goat-poisoning crone, a violent alcoholic, a pair of adulterers and a disrespectful son. These wretched souls are visited in the night by the Grim Reaper, and each must face eternal justice (or in the words of the videotape box synopsis, "each must face their own terrible horror and terror"). This Depression-era period piece boasts a unique idea in casting the Angel of Death as a serial killer, but ultimately A Day of Judgement is more a heavy handed morality play than the horror film it bills itself as. The scenes of the Reaper's revenge are clumsily staged and often confusing, and despite brief gore effects and a laughably cheap vision of Hell at the climax, the remaining running time (too long at 101 minutes) is a dull, Southern-fried batch of cliches. Some actors are tolerable, others amateurish, and many are regulars from the films of producer/actor/director Earl Owensby, a prolific maker of low-budget features for drive-ins of the South during the 1970s. A Day of Judgement is hardly in league with whacked-out religious horror gems like Blood Freak or the gory testimonies of born-again exploitation director Ron Ormond, and its fragile morality is sometimes questionable (why does the resigning pastor escape the scythe when he allows his own feelings of failure to drive him out of a town that desperately needs spiritual guidance?). A corny "it was all a dream" ending finds our sinners casting aside greed, lust, drunkenness and hatred as Sunday morning beckons with a brand-new preacher who sports a strangely familiar black cloak. This simplistic view of human nature as something that can be simply "scared straight" isn't likely to win any new recruits or even provide sniggering entertainment for nonbelievers. — Fred Beldin